It is indeed strange that a paper which strives to the ideals of 'classical liberalism' should fawn so desperately and foolishly at the coerced imperialism and monopolistic mercantilism of the company.

The history of the East India Company is fundamentally inseparable from the atrocities of British imperialism in India. Your attempts to reconcile the 'benefits' of the company with little occurrence to consider seriously its evils - referred to by the writer as merely 'bullying' and 'duffing up' - is dangerous (as all rewriting of history is dangerous to humanity) and embarrassing (as unbalanced, poor thinking is embarrassing for your readers).

The success of the East India Company was founded, sustained and grown with the help of millions of Indians. These were ordinary unlettered people, craftsmen, farmers, traders, teachers, princes, kings (the maharajas), policemen, thugs, priests, cooks, butlers, wastrels, bards, coachmen, drivers, builders, gardeners, bankers, clerks, writers and translators. What an amazing ecosystem that worked together. Every possible human motive and emotion worked into this ecosystem to make it function as well as it did. Its most extraordinary success is that it inspired these Indians to seek and to obtain their political freedom.

In 1606, James I chartered the Virginia Company of London which established the Jamestown settlement in 1607 to exploit commodities (particularly gold and silver) in America. Although no precious metals were found, Jamestown established America as a nation founded on trade and commerce (NOT religious freedom) and introduced a style of democracy through the House of Burgess that would be the training ground for many of the Founding Fathers. Although dissolved in 1624 following a massacre of colonists in March 1622 and a mass poisoning of natives in retaliation the following year, I would argue that the Virginia Company was the model for modern America. If the Virginia Company was another example of State Capitalism, how does this square with the myths of America's founding and the current Conservative ideology ?

The East India company was at least partially responsible for a shocking theft of India's resources, for 100+ years, which left millions starving and turned one of the richest regions of the world into a basket case.

It was NO model that anyone in today's world should or can afford to follow.

East India company was also responsible for creating a needlessly gigantic and rather inept bureaucracy, which has become a HUGE liability for India post independence. I only hope India can dismantle it slowly, so that it can continue to progress. Please don't mislead your readers by praising East India Company for such "contributions".

Are you serious in suggesting that the East India Company which went out of existence in the 1860s or a little after was responsible for the infamous Indian bureaucracy of the last 60+ years? Absurd on the face of it and requiring more than prejudice to justify it. Margaret Thatcher took less than a decade to overthrow the worst of the UK equivalent, so are you suggesting that Indian leaders have been so incompetent or so corrupt that they couldn't or wouldn't do the same in over 60 years?

If you want to make a case against Britain or the West may I point you in the direction of the left in politics which meant that China got a vast overdose of the quintessentially Western Karl Marx, fortified by a bit of rough Leninism and Stalinism, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh took took the worst of Parisian marxism back home and all the upright patriotic sub-continental gentlemen who had been educated in Britain from about the 1890s to the 1940s got an overdose of the kind of socialism which, as social democracy the Europeans could just about afford (until they formed the Eurozone) but left the UK, India and New Zealand just for a sample, with radically uncompetitive economies. Of course they didn't get rid of the "Licence Raj" but made it their own. They were socialists who apparently forgot that, until the British turned up, they had had a prosperous industrialised sub-continent just about to take off into hyper-modernity.

Nothing in this essay mitigates my abhorrence of the East India Company.

The fact that its civil servants ethos led to the current Indian civil service is nothing to crow about especially if you have to deal with those pompous upstarts.

Although with the bribery and corruption it was very much up-to-date. Quite frankly I see nothing exceptional in the nexus of Government/Politics and Business/Commerce. Can These Things Ever Be Divorced??? will they ever be? MeThinks Not, such is the lot of us common folk.

ah..the nostalgia that TE can bring back...gone are the days of imperial governance, ruling the "continent" as TE puts it and ruling millions of people to UK's whims and fancy.
All UK and TE can do now is live in the past and think about the glory days...those days are long gone and UK is limping its ways into obilivion. TE may follow soon if it doesnt wake up soon and start smelling the roses.
i as an indian is having the last laugh and the story is not over yet. dont you love when hisotry repeats itself

ah..the nostalgia that TE can bring back...gone are the days of imperial governance, ruling the "continent" as TE puts it and ruling millions of people to UK's whims and fancy.
All UK and TE can do now is live in the past and think about the glory days...those days are long gone and UK is limping its ways into obilivion. TE may follow soon if it doesnt wake up soon and start smelling the roses.
i as an indian is having the last laugh and the story is not over yet. dont you love when hisotry repeats itself
--------------------------

Don't we (the world) still live under the mercy of Great Britain and her descendant US of A ?? :D

This article on the East India Company and its ‘innovations’ sugar-coats the barbaric history of the British in India; which was that of racism, subjugation, looting and genocide. In fact these were the real innovations. The article perpetuates the myth of the British in India as being benevolent when in fact their presence on the subcontinent was pure wealth extraction.

Nick Robins in his paper (1) on the British East India Company stated:
"And for many Indians, it was the Company’s plunder that first de-industrialized their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain’s own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor. " (1)

Britain at the time of its rule in India was the western world’s foremost democracy whilst the British in India were the world’s foremost racist dictatorship which routinely practiced genocide as a policy. (2)

All countries that were populated by whites at the height of British imperialism were granted self-rule, except brown-skinned India. (2) The thieving had to be controlled.

Nick Robins further states: "The East India Company’s escape from reckoning enables the people of Britain to pass over the source of much of their current affluence and allows India’s continuing poverty to be viewed as a product of its culture and climate rather than as something manufactured in pursuit of external profit." (1)

This denial of history continued and made it easy for Winston Churchill to effortlessly live with the genocide of Indians in the 20th century. A book review based on the Churchill that appeared in the New York Times stated:
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died. (3)

By white-washing the bits of history the British people have a fantasy version of their role in India when the truth is that they were the cause of its financial ruin and impoverishment. With the advent of the internet it is harder than ever to suppress history.

The Economist does itself and its readers a disservice by continuing to hide the truth.

Well said David. The Economist is a bit like the oracle of Delphi in its last days. Moaning and wailing of its glorious past which it distorts and presenting half-truths and lies to keep itself relevant.
To understand why The Economist does it is to understand the wellspring of its thinking. It is a product of the period described in this distorted essay. It's success and growth it owes to the thinking propagated then. This runs to a predictable type:
1. The Englishman was noble, righteous, brave, enlightened, scientifically advanced spreading democracy, education and civilization.
2. Indians were a backward, ridden country ruled by malevolent weak kings who oppressed and terrorized their people into poverty and classes. The Indians had no idea of science or education, were morally corrupt and infested will all ills and evils possible in mind soul and body.
3. the brave Englishman that too just a handful, rode in to do trade but were moved by the sorrow of the Indian poor who fell on their feet beseeching and imploring them to help. Reluctantly this handful drove away the evil Kings, got rid of the caste system, built India's infrastructure, gave them laws, a government
4. In return the ungrateful Indian rose in revolt and killed English women and children in 1857, roaming around like mad men drunk on opium. It again took a few brave Englishmen to quell this.
5. The noble British parliament then felt very sorry for India and directly governed it bringing in their cloth to clothe the naked fakirs that Indians were
6. Regretfully the Indians instead of being grateful were led by a mad fakir and despite being protected by again a handful of brave Englishmen against Japanese invasion, were insisting on freedom.
7. At this time fed up of Indians forcing each other to starve to death, the handful of Brave Englishmen left India with the majority of Indians weeping for them not to go and continue to let the Indians be happy at their feet.
8. As predicted at independence the country immediately broke up and continues to disintegrate. Its people are back to utter poverty, squabbling and unable to do anything. Its businessmen are yet given opportunities by allowing them to learn from owning profitable British car, tea and other companies.
9. Soon the population of India will realize that they are best suited to be servants of the British and will return to lick their masters feet.
If TE deviates from this, then it would mean a fundamental question for its 'reason of existence' If any one part of this story is proved true, the rest of it fall likes dominoes and the Economist's intellectual standpoint is destroyed. Putting a big question-mark on its very existence! Moreover if the reality would be faced then Britain which is already declining will lose its moral spine and disintegrate completely. So to keep the country going the lies of the past have to keep getting fed. Therefore you will find right through TE always this one view point carried through without deviation.
Sadly TE and the British should have the courage instead to face up to their past and acknowledge the half-truths and lies they have been swallowing. Because only when it acknowledges the truth will real change happen and the nation and the newspaper become a truly great one.

Well if the sub-continent had its act together the East India Company would not have even made a footnote in history. Also, keep in mind that almost all the troops under the company's command were Indian. So the Company paid Indians to "butcher" Indians.

If it was not the British who did it, it would have been someone else due to the flaws that existed.

Good Lafiel, if the British have 'paid to butcher Indians' only because the butchering would anyway have happened, let them not call it a great form of enterprise (as this article propounds), not call itself a beacon of democracy, and most of all not call itself a civilised nation, they all mean something else!

I think you (along with the commentator below) misread or misunderstood the article here.

It wasn't extolling the East India company, and in fact wasn't trying to pass any judgement about whether it was good or bad for India at all; rather, the point being made was somewhat orthogonal to that discussion -- that a state-owned monopoly serves two masters, and is therefore (in the author's opinion) doomed to eventually fail due to this contradiction.

Thank you for attempting to clarify. From your ability to take this article at face-value, I presume you are not from the sub-continent. The John Company is possibly the most evil thing to have befallen the people of Asia. It was a dark hour indeed when the Emperor Jehangir gave the men from the East India company permission to do business here. The atrocities they committed on the people of India is unparalleled. I will stop here about the company as this much is well known and shift the focus to this article.
This article agrees that the company sowed the seeds of the British Empire, and this is well documented. In todays connected world, where countries are being made to pay for their misdeeds, The British now want to disown their past crimes to escape from future retribution. Because it is well known that the British treasury contains priceless Indian treasures. The Peacock throne, the kohinoor are all Indian property to be returned to the people of India. The British propaganda is trying to do two things: Distance itself from the EIC so that all blame is directed to it absolving the British Govt/conscience. With such articles, it is also trying to soften the blow on the EIC (and further mitigate damage that may yet find its way to the British Government and conscience) by such warped articles that portray the company as some kind of a role model for modern public sector companies. This is a bucket load of trash, because we know that govt companies today operate under strict guidelines Chinese or American.
Please re-read lines such as: "The Company’s success in preserving its animal spirits owed more to necessity than to cunning."
"This produced a guaranteed income from Bengal’s taxpayers, but it also dragged the Company ever deeper into the business of government."
This makes the EIC sound Lilly-white being forced to do things they didn't want to. Reality we know is that the EIC and the British in India were opportunistic, they looted the country, sucked every bit of it out and left it mentally, morally and emotionally shattered.
By my earlier comment I want more people like you to realize the REAL HISTORY and people from Britain and TE to take cognizance and accept the evils of the past and break free from this stereotype they are made to believe about themselves.
Fact is evil like good is in every human, white, black or brown, the moment we believe in stereotypes we begin to differentiate between people where the evils of prejudice take root.

The presumption isn't true, but it should be irrelevant; to reiterate, the article didn't deny the history you mentioned -- as you mentioned, it is well known, and The Economist would be foolish to try to do so -- so much as didn't mention it at all.

Given this, your objections can be grouped into two categories: facts which you feel should have been mentioned alongside the article, and facts which you feel were misrepresented by the article.

I share your historical misgivings about the company, but surely it would be cumbersome to add a historical recap of a topic each time an article about a topic is mentioned (still, it should be mentioned, and the links in the Economist blog posts serve this purpose; this being a reproduction of the printed article doesn't). Anyone hearing the term for the first time is free to Google it -- so we can dispense with the first category in the interest of brevity.

I wouldn't equate the Economist with "British propaganda". (They might be, but it would be foolish to do so -- who would want to read a mouthpiece of the British government? They would certainly lose my subscription).

The article doesn't show how the company is a role model for public sector companies today - it is simply showing how they are similar in the sense of being (1) backed by the state and (2) having a monopoly.

As for "accepting the evil in every human", I agree with your sentiment but the Economist hasn't ever been in the business of moralizing about its topics -- I usually go to the op-ed pages of a regular newspaper for that.

I find your argument excellent. The issues are this:
1. It is wrong to pick up a subject like EIC to make any kind of point because of the sheer damage this company did. You would be better off having Al Quaida as a case study in managing global markets?
2. Leaving it to people to google to find out is dangerously speaking half-truths. The rest of the world is not going to google details, they'll takeout only the half -truths this article presents which if it continues to happen will become the truth.
3. As far as the propaganda part is concerned, publications of every country however independent often mouth the govt lines: No notable US publication questioned the 2001 Afgan invasion; even if you don't count that the Iraq invasion that followed had enough of world opposition yet American press was mostly silent. Even TE takes great pleasure in pointing out how TOI sings the Indian govts tune on growth. (Maybe you ought to be reviewing your subscription)
4. If the limited point the article is making is a parallel on modern PSU's and EIC by pointing out they "(1) backed by the state and (2) having a monopoly." there are better examples to give certainly? And how significant are these points really?
5. For moralizing lessons you need to read TE on Chinese politics please

Am not sure if you are correct on saying that because of British, specially East India company, India became imporverished.

Lets not forget that prior to the company, India was ruled by feudal kings and princeses, who had their own vested interests. India wasnt a utopia before or after the British.

By contrast, Company and British rule did introduce many philosophy of Enlightment to India which helped banning the Sati, etc. Many Indians were introduced to liberal ideas that were being discussed in Europe of those times.

And lets not forget, the poverty of India could have been eradicated in last 60 years of independence, if Nehru had not followed the socialist model for more than 40 years after independence.

No doubt it was racist later on specially from 1900 onwards, like Indians wasnt allowed in certain places, but we have to look this in context. This was a time when first world war happened and seeds of nazism was being put. First 50 years of 20th century has not been kind to human history in most places of the world.

I am no historian and we are hardly the people who can judge the company or the British in those times. We can only read narratives and make our own conclusions.

5. Ah yes, Chinese politics. Absolutely true, point conceded!
4. There may or may not be better examples, this article simply asserts that the EIC was chronologically the first example.
3. I disagree, because (1) it depends on what 'notable' publications are, and (2) the Economist's British section doesn't seem to necessarily always conform. But yes, this is a weak argument to make.
2. That is true, I share your fear here, although I don't see a way out.
1. Strongly disagree here -- this would make it impossible to talk about many of the most important things in the world. Anything and everything must be made available for criticism and understanding.

Your point 3 : Wouldn't you consider 'Time' and this very publication as notable?
Your second and last point: Sir, many people in this comment thread have mentioned this: By cold logic why hasn't TE published an article on the methodical and industrious manner in which the Nazis extracted work and gold from the imprisoned jews, sold them converted it into armament for the war? Does your mind not recoil at the thought of reading such an article? Are these really necessary? You would ask aren't there better example to give than something in which there is limitless agony and sorrow? The Nazi atrocities are a fraction of what happened in India. A fraction. The angry posts by white, black and brown people to this article shows you where journalism and management ends and a broader idea of humanity emerges. Everything is not economics and business. And we fear such articles that purport to be on such topics are in fact veiled arguments of defense.
Lastly I must add I enjoyed your points, I respect them and agree there is a mid-point which is reality. While you are right in maintaining your point of view, I can only request you to take cognizance of the pain you can feel in the posts of my countrymen and maybe ponder on why this article is so disappointing.

Yes, I have to agree with that looking at what is not covered and what examples are not picked does reveal journalistic bias.
Nevertheless, I still think that there should be a space somewhere to objectively argue and examine facts and ideas regardless of the emotional baggage that the terms involved may evoke, and I consider the Economist one of those spaces.

Thanks for arguing rationally with me! It is such a rare thing to find in comments everywhere, and I'm grateful for it. Have a happy new year!

Joski65, you must have bored people with that rant so often that a packaged mindset is your only way of thinking about India and British history. Unfortunately it doesn't have much to do with what the article says. The article didn't even mention the impeachment of Warren Hastings which occurred at about the time that English evangelicals (led by Quakers in the case of the abolition of slavery) were actually leading Britain and therefore, after the Napoleonic Wars, the rest of the world towards a relatively civlised liberalism. True the most prosperous modern countries have shown a capacity for backsliding in a big way when they lose some of the protective comfort zone of prosperity and security around them (not to mention other reasons for atavistic behaviour). The "Indian Wars" in the United State, the Holocaust (though not, perhaps, the genocide of the Armenians which did not happen in a modern country),through to My Lai and Abu Ghreib are all great blemishes on a generally upward trajectory. If Britain hadn't been weakened by European civil wars it would hardly have allowed the mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus at the time of partition, but then the joski65s probably have a way of blaming those disasters exclusively on British rule or misrule instead of carefully avoiding anachronism and understanding the remarkably rapid changes in Zeitgeist over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution brought an end to the Hobbes-Malthus world of overbreeding populations fighting each other far more than trading or co-operating.
In my visits to India as a non-Indian colonial I have been struck by the nostalgia for the days of the Raj from all sorts of people who are neither mixed race nor Christian (though some of them too) but just professionals of various kinds sick and tired of corrupt politicians..... But the British of course taught them how to be corrupt....

You think 120 "recommends" doesn't indicate the number of emotional cripples in your group but some validity in your Weltanschauung. The world isn't quite as delusional and dysfunctional as that fortunately. So far you seem to have only rounded up 109 fellow sads to recommend your outpouring.

And you haven't gathered even one, you poor demented soul! with an inability to know the difference between comment and comments besides a learning deficiency in addition and analytics...buzz off now will you?

I think you, like most sensitive souls on this blog, are missing the point of the article which was about organisation and business forms, not about morality. Until the Industrial Revolution made it possible to supersede the pre-Malthusian and Hobbesian competition of all against all (exaggerating slightly since civilisation and decency had been creeping up slowly) war and predation were simple continuities from the earliest hunter gatherer human clans. About the time Warren Hastins was impeached in the British Parliament for his actions in India Adam Smith was pointing the way that, self-interestedly if you like, Britain promoted towards free trade and the opening up of the global economy. That, with many zig zags, has been the foundation of a radically changed world. That, I suggest is an important fact and doesn't need to be discussed as reflecting superior morality on the part of one nation or people - though it is often desirable to recall that Adam Smith was a very fine modern moralist whose sentiments would not seem to be reactionary today.

Oh dear! I have just been following an Econoist blog on the Chinese language with great interest and, with the odd exception, it is full of literate, intelligent comment. Here unfortunately is a complete misunderstanding by you of joski65. Irony, or rather irony so heavy-handed that it is no more than sarcasm. But you are right not to bother to read him....

"I can only request you to take cognizance of the pain you can feel in the posts of my countrymen and maybe ponder on why this article is so disappointing." Happily the Indians I know are not such a pathetic bunch of whingers and losers as you paint them, far from it. Nor do they need to say such ridiculous things - without any attempt at evidence as "The Nazi atrocities are a fraction of what happened in India. A fraction". Even if only moderately well informed about European affairs or history you would know that the Holocaust (not forgetting the slavs and gypsies - descendants of lower caste Indians) would rank as almost everyone's outstanding atrocity, partly because it was a nation thought to be at the leading edge of European civilisation, as it had been of education, that perpetrated it. You can't expect to have any credibility if you rely on mere assertion to contradict that widely held view. Just to help you gear up, can you cite anything by the British in India, or indeed Africa after 1807 when the slave trade ended, which is comparable to the treatment of Native Americans by the United States from about 1830 onwards?

I know you like your fragile ego propped up with Recommendations so when I saw you without one I went soft and gave you one. Hope I haven't missed any. Don't cry if I haven't managed to repair all such neglect.

Read “Churchill's Secret War” By the German Author, Madhusree Mukerjee on the 1944 Bengal famine. A book reviewed in 'Time' as excellent. 4 Mn Bengali Indians died in 1942-44 alone. Thats not accounting for the millions who died in the famine in South India that preceded it...besides the innumerable other deaths in the 200 years of British Rule in India.
KPATOS... please know what you're talking about and move on now...

I largely gave up reading Time 55 years ago when I realised that on every subject I knew something about it was wrong or misleading. It says much about your low-brow populism that you cite Time. I had already read largely unfavourable reviews of Mukerjee's book, most notably I think in the New York Review of Books and follow up correspondence. (Time's noted Australian art historian/critic Robert Hughes wrote a much acclaimed popular history of the first years of settlement in Australia from 1788 "The Fatal Shore" but all it proved was that when the Jesuit educated atheist let the Irish run in him run away with fluent verbiage the result would be a dog of a history; compare the comment below that Mukerjee is no historian. You do add the interesting information that she is German which may explain a lot if she feels uncomfortable about living amongst the great exterminators of Tanganyika, Namibia and Eastern Europe ).

A sample of reviews from Googling will certainly show up the kind of second rate Indian academic that London lefties love but this I suggest is more to the point:

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee. Basic Books, 368 pp., $28.95, Amazon $19.11.

Mr. Herman is author of Gandhi & Churchill (2008), a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and is now a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Voltaire once said the problem with the Holy Roman Empire was that it was neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire. One could say of Churchill's Secret War that it is neither secret, a war, nor has it much to do with Churchill.

Ms. Mukerjee, who writes for Scientific American and is no historian, has gotten herself entangled in three separate and contentious issues: Britain's battle with Indian nationalists like Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose; Churchill's often tempestuous views on India; and the 1943-44 Bengal famine. Out of them she attempts to build a plausible cause-and-effect narrative. All she manages is to mangle the facts regarding all three, doing a disservice to both historical and moral truth.

In mid-October 1942 a devastating cyclone ripped through the coastal regions of east Bengal (today lower Bangladesh), killing thousands and decimating the autumn rice crop up to forty miles inland. Rice that should have been planted that winter was instead consumed. When hot weather arrived in May 1943, the rice crop was a fraction of normal for Bengal's peasantry, who had spent centuries living on the edge of starvation.

Turning bad news into disaster were the Japanese, who had just overrun Burma, the main source of India's rice imports. Within a month, the entire southeastern portion of the subcontinent faced starvation. The governments in New Delhi and Bengal were unprepared, and as the heat intensified, people began to die. It was the greatest humanitarian crisis the British Raj had faced in more than half a century.

One might easily blame the disaster on the Japanese, but there were other problems of India's own making. Many local officials were either absent (Bengal's governor fell ill and died), distracted by the eruption of Bose's Quit India movement; or simply too slow and corrupt to react. Bengal's Muslim majority ministry did nothing, while many of its Hindu members were making huge profits trading in rice during the shortage. Finally, the magnitude of what was happening did not reach the attention of London and Churchill until it was too late.

No Churchill critic, not even Ms. Mukerjee, has yet found a way to blame Churchill for actually triggering the famine in the way that, for example, Stalin caused the Great Famine in the Ukraine or Mao the mass starvations during China's "Great Leap Forward." Instead, the claim is that Churchill's callous racist attitudes, developed during his years in India in the 1890s and typical of the British imperialist ruling elite, not only blinded him to the human suffering but led him to make decisions that prolonged and aggravated the death toll. This included deliberately halting shipments of food that might have relieved the suffering, while insisting that food exports from India to Britain continue despite a famine that by mid-October 1943 was killing 2000 a month in Calcutta.

Today, of course, no accusation against a statesman of the recent past carries more gravity than that of racism. But Churchill's position in mid-1943 needs to be appreciated before we begin accusing him—as Mukerjee does—of war crimes.

During that crucial summer, the Anglo-Americans had just managed to prevail in the Atlantic U-boat war, although neither Churchill nor Roosevelt yet knew how decisively. Germany had suffered a decisive setback at Kursk on the Eastern Front, Japan at Guadalcanal in the Pacific, but both remained deadly opponents. Japan was still poised on the border of India, where a massive uprising instigated by Gandhi against British rule had just been suppressed. Meanwhile, both America and Britain were bracing for their impending landings in Italy.

How likely was it that Churchill would respond to the news of the Bengal famine-the seriousness of which was yet unrealized by his India advisers Viceroy Linlithgow and Secretary for India Leo Amery-as anything more than an unwelcome distraction?

Past doubt, Churchill's feelings toward India at that time were far from charitable. He and British officials had narrowly averted disaster by suppressing the Quit India movement, which had threatened to shut down the country even as the Japanese threatened it with invasion. And, like most Englishmen of his generation, Churchill held views on Indians and other non-whites that are very far from our thinking today.

[cont 3]
Yet the truth runs more deeply against Mukerjee than she is willing to admit. Her evidence of Churchill's intransigence on India stems mainly from Leo Amery's diary, where he recorded every one of the Prime Minister's furious outbursts whenever Amery brought up the famine in the War Cabinet-whether Churchill meant what he said or not.

Amery privately decided that "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane," and recorded in August 1944 Churchill's remark that relief would do no good because Indians "breed like rabbits" and will outstrip any available food supply. "Naturally I lost patience," Amery records, "and couldn't help telling him that I didn't see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's, which annoyed him no little."

This invidious comparison of Churchill with Hitler is the thematic hinge of the book. Unfortunately for the author, the actual record contradicts her account at almost every point.

When the War Cabinet became fully aware of the extent of the famine, on 24 September 1943, it agreed to send 200,000 tons of grain to India by the end of the year. Far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his cabinet sought every way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort. The war—not starving Indians or beating them into submission—remained the principal concern.

Reading Mukerjee's account, one might never know there was a war raging in Europe and the rest of Asia. Germany barely rates a mention. Japan appears mainly as the sympathetic ally of anti-British Indian nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose. In reality, Japan and Germany had far more dire plans for India than any ever hatched in Britain.

Even Amery had to admit, during the Quebec Conference, that the case against diverting vital war shipping to India was "unassailable." Far from a racist conspiracy to break the country, the viceroy noted that "all the Dominion Governments are doing their best to help." While Churchill and the War Cabinet vetoed a Canadian proposal to send 100,000 tons of wheat to India, they did push for Australia to fulfill that commitment.

The greatest irony of all is that it was Churchill who appointed, in October 1943, the viceroy who would halt the famine in its tracks: General Archibald Wavell immediately commandeered the army to move rice and grain from areas where it was plentiful to where it was not, and begged Churchill to send what help he could. On 14 February 1944 Churchill called an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet to see if a way to send more aid could be found that would not wreck plans for the coming Normandy invasion. "I will certainly help you all I can," Churchill telegraphed Wavell on the 14th, "but you must not ask the impossible." [cont 3 - 4]

[cont 4]
The next day Churchill wired Wavell: "We have given a great deal of thought to your difficulties, but we simply cannot find the shipping." Amery told the viceroy that Churchill "was not unsympathetic" to the terrible situation, but that no one had ships to spare with military operations in the offing. On April 28th Churchill spearheaded an appeal to Roosevelt and the Americans, but they too proved resistant to humanitarian appeals with the invasion of Europe pending.

Another irony: the harvest of 1943 was one of the largest in India's history. Claims of starvation and civil unrest seemed, from the fastness of 5000 miles away, far-fetched, as they did in Washington. And Wavell thanked Churchill for "your generous assistance" in getting Australia to send 350,000 tons of wheat to India—although still short of the 600,000 tons thought necessary.

These ironies are lost on Ms. Mukerjee. If Churchill had truly intended to maintain the Raj in India by undermining nationalists like Gandhi and Bose, he could have done no better than to divert vital resources. But Churchill's attention was focused on another goal: winning the war. Amery admitted as much in a note to Wavell on 26 June, three weeks after D-Day: "Winston, in his position, will naturally run any risk rather than one which immediately affects the great military stakes to which we are committed."

That Churchill could be ruthless in pursuing his main objective the citizens of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin and a dozen other German cities were about to find out. But no racist or imperialist motives can be imputed there.

Of all the people who ignored the Bengal famine, perhaps the most curious case is Ms. Mukerjee's hero, Mohandas Gandhi. For all his reputation as a humanitarian, Gandhi did remarkably little about the emergency. The issue barely comes up in his letters, except as another grievance against the Raj-which, in peacetime, had always handled famines with efficiency.

In February 1944 Gandhi wrote to Wavell: "I know that millions outside are starving for want of food. But I should feel utterly helpless if I went out and missed the food [i.e. independence] by which alone living becomes worthwhile."

Gandhi felt free to conduct his private "fast unto death" in order to force the British out, even as the rest of India starved, because he felt he was playing for far bigger stakes. As was Winston Churchill.

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The London based Indian reviewer who wrote a little potboiler for The Indpendent managed to include reference to the greater impact of famine under the Raj caused by various policies without mentioning the elephant in the room; rapid increase in population which was also, no doubt, the main cause for the increase in famine deaths in China in the last two hundred years or so. Nor did it mention the fact that the tiny expatriate Indian civil service could hardly do much about the agricultural and marketing or hoarding practices of millions of Indians. Generalisations are a great cover for unsupported prejudices.

I don't know why most commentators on this article are looking at aspects of history the article doesn't address. This article was not supposed to be a comprehensive history of the British rule in India. It is an article on how state-backed firms work, can work, and might work.

It does not address whether their behaviour is moral, or correct. Nor is it intended to justify anything the Company did in moral terms. A single article, to-pages long, is never intended to convey the full convictions of anyone rational.

This is an article about how a state-backed company deals with its own government, and how it might flourish or perish. It is not about how it affects the countries it operates in. Maybe those countries ought to be wary. But that is not the aspect of such companies being addressed here, but only its management and its identity in a corporate sense.

TE has written justly and rationally about British imperialism before and will likely do so again. But that does not mean it has to be apologetic in every article it ever writes that touches on the British Empire. Those who expect such things are letting the past dominate too much of their outlook, and do themselves and those they seek to address a disservice.

The article miserably failed to talk about the crucial half of its management story, i.e. the relationships it build using coercion and bribes with the landed, wealthy heads of states of different parts of the sub-continent. Any story about the EIC that does not talk about those core facets of what made the EIC "successful" is at best incomplete, and more likely, inclined to gloss over those inconvenient details. Thus any iota of credibility that the EIC could possibly have as a "role model" for state run companies of the 21st century is lost with that pathetic filtering of the truth.

Whether or not World Citizen is English I beg leave to doubt. In any event, how can you justify your word "obfuscator"? What is unclear about what he says? And/or what issue or proposition that you claim to be clear is he rendering unclear and confused?

Quite so. The British first destroyed India, and then tried to make it in a Western image as servants. Thank God that we finally got rid of them. We waited forever for the Germans to destroy them. They succeeded, but not in a dramatic fashion. The British limped home after WWII, leaving a mess behind them in India and Kashmir. There had been other invaders before who had settled down and become 'one of us'. The British were like their Aryan cousins the Germans (not the real Aryans, the Indians) and could not dream of mixing in.

KPATOS (“K”) needs to relax the quantity and focus on the quality of his/her replies. A good start will be to learn the meaning of the word obfuscation. K seems to confound it with “confusion” and “unclear”. Having figured out the meaning of obfuscation it is possible that K may realize that the questions raised in his/her reply were unnecessary.

K seems to know that World Citizen (“WC” – pun was not intended) is a male. Perhaps K knows WC, perhaps K and WC are two names of the same person, or perhaps, which appears more likely, K is just being presumptuous as he/she also comes across in a couple of other replies that I read; I had stomach for only a couple.

Good luck to K in his/her endeavors to unclear his/her confusion about obfuscation. I also wish K a Happier 2012.

I may be in the (probably well populated) category of those who have forgotten more than you ever learned but didn't think I could have been mistaken about the meaning of an accusation of obfuscation. Now I suppose you are as lazy as you are glib and self-satisfied because five seconds taken to Google "define obfuscation" gives many definitions of which the first is typical and reads
"ob·fus·cate ( b f -sk t , b-f s k t ). tr.v. ob·fus·cat·ed, ob·fus·cat·ing, ob·fus·cates. 1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand: "

I really don't think it possible to justify "obfuscation" as a criticism of the article. Can you stand being wrong?

I also doubt that you know the meaning, or at least proper use of "presumptuous". It doesn't just mean that one has to do a lot of presuming or chooses to, or just does. One might say that many of the careless not-very-bright and not-very-well-read bloggers on this article are presumptuous in presuming (meaning 2) to treat their contributions as worthy to be published by a venerable and respected publication like TE.

for the word "article" I should have said "contribution [by World-Citizen]" in my first reply. Before you fall back on petty quibble I note that you yourself changed the word that I allegedly didn't understand from "obfuscator" to "obfuscation" - a difference in both cases without significance.

Open Seas? Really?
Open Seas and Freedom of the Seas is a nice way for the world's premier power to basically say: we rule the seas and reserve the right of 'negative control' over you, if you attempt to challenge our navy, we will attack you on the seas.
Navies exist to protect commercial and imperial interests. It is the same now as it was 500 years ago.

As seafarers the Portuguese were first, but they build no empire. The Dutch were the first to create a limited liability company with shares. September 1509, they have discovered the shares in a Dutch archive. After the Portuguese came the Spaniards, and after the Dutch the English.

Okay, I can give you that the Dutch were pioneers of corporate structure. I am just saying that the Portuguese provided the foundation for European colonialism in the East Indies with settlements in Melaka, Timor, and a brief one on Ternate. The Dutch muscled out the Portuguese and the English effectively out of the spice trade through a combination of business practices and military force. I find the native business system in Melaka prior to colonialism interesting.

I am replacing "moral" with "practitioners of corporate/ responsibility" in my other comment to avoid sounding judgmental unlike most of the comments in the forum.

I agree with you. One other aspect in "ruling the world", is that the Spaniards replaced the Portuguese, the Spaniards were replaced by the Dutch, they in turn were replaced by the English, now it is the turn of the Americans to be replaced.
The other aspect of this historical sequence is that no citizen of all these countries (Portuguese, Spanish etc.) sitting in a bar talking to each other (in German, Stammtisch talk), or now today, blogging, could even imagine that their country would loose hegemony.
Can you? or are you not American like me?